Hank Williams, the man who, more than any other, defines country music in the American mind turns 100 this year (or would, if he hadn’t died 70 years ago).
To celebrate the Williams centennial, the New York-based country singer Tennessee Walt will be performing an all-Williams concert on October 8 at the Great Neck Public Library.
The show will include classic Williams songs such as “I Saw the Light,” “Jambalaya” and “Your Cheating Heart,” but also lesser-known Williams songs and rarities, including songs that were never commercially recorded and survived only as posthumously released demo tapes.
And, as always, Walt will talk about the stories behind the songs and the man who wrote them.
“In one sense, everybody knows Hank Williams,” said Gayden Wren, the Queens resident who performs on voice and piano as Tennessee Walt. “Even if you’re not a country fan and were born decades after his death, you’ve heard his unmistakable voice on movie soundtracks, on television and on radio. When people who don’t know country think about country, it’s his voice they hear.
“On the other hand, he’s also surprisingly unknown for someone of his stature, an iconic figure who lived in the 20th century and is arguably more popular today than he’s ever been,” Wren continued. “He died at 29, released only 31 singles and no albums, never appeared in much of the country, never appeared in a movie and is featured in less than eight minutes of surviving television footage. He did very few newspaper interviews, wrote no memoir and no books about him appeared in his lifetime.
“There are a lot of things that people don’t know about Hank Williams,” he concluded, “even if they think they do.
How many of his songs did he write? Where did his ideas come from? How often was he married? We don’t even really know when he died or even in what year he died. This show is an opportunity for people to hear some of the greatest American songs ever written, and also to learn some fascinating things about the man who created them.”
The Hank Williams Century is the seventh show from Tennessee Walt, following on the heels of “The Other Great American Songbook,” “Bristol & Beyond: The Birth of Country Music,” “Hanks a Lot!,” “Riding with the Outlaws,” “An Afternoon in the Country” and “Three Chords and the Truth: Country’s Greatest Songwriters.”
Those shows have been enthusiastically received in dozens of venues in the greater New York area, as well as in Florida, Michigan, Tennessee and Texas.
Tennessee Walt’s The Hank Williams Century will be presented on Sunday, Oct. 8, at 2 p.m. at the Great Neck Public Library at 159 Bayview Ave. in Great Neck. Admission is free. For further information, call (516) 466-8055 or visit the library’s website.
